paracusia

noun

1. a disorder in the sense of hearing
2. auditory hallucination
3. a weird Ruby script for vocalizing conversations between robots

Why??

You know, for science.

Running the thing

Scientists will rejoice in the elegance and simplicity of running paracusia:

./paracusia.rb /path/to/conversations/directory

The directory path argument is optional and defaults to ./conversations.

Configuring the thing

Put one or more .convo files in the conversations directory, formatted like this:

Bruce: Hi, I'm Bruce.
Hysterical: Hello, Bruce, I'm Hysterical! HAHAHAHA

The part before the colon gets parsed as the name of the voice to pass to the say utility's -v option. Paracusia assumes you have all the voices you use installed on your Mac because why wouldn't you?

Conversations are vocalized in parallel, simulating a room full of robot conversations. If you don't appreciate the intrinsic scientific value of this script right now, you're probably doing it wrong.

Requirements

• Ruby
• The say utility (standard on OS X) installed in your path
• Any voices you specify in your .convo files
• SCIENCE

Documentation

This is it. If you want to peer-review this important research, open an issue and together we will make the Science better!

Inspiration

• Science, of course
• These nerds
• Those same nerds' code